Hispanic Linguistics
Our Program
The Hispanic Linguistics Program at The Ohio State University offers one of the most distinguished and comprehensive MA and PhD programs in the nation. Ohio State is one of the largest research universities in the United States and there are many resources on our campus to support the study of Hispanic Linguistics from distinct perspectives. Specifically, OSU has nationally ranked Departments of Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, Speech and Hearing Sciences as well as a Center for Cognitive Sciences. Students and faculty enjoy the benefits of the 9 million volume OSU library as well as state of the art research and instructional facilities.The students in our program are international, national and local, including graduates of our own undergraduate linguistics concentration. OSU's rich academic environment offers a unique opportunity for students to receive comprehensive preparation as Hispanic Linguistics scholars and we are building a track record of placing them in the growing field of Hispanic Linguistics. We invite you to explore our Web site to learn more about what we do and to contact us if we can help you pursue interests related to ours.
Research Areas
Our faculty have many overlapping areas of research and are by no means limited to the following concentrations. However, the following descriptions give an idea of how our collaborative and individual work has developed thus far. Please refer to individual faculty web pages for further detail and links to papers.
Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology
Professor Martínez-Gil's current projects include studies of intonation and incredulity with Su Ar Lee and Mary Beckman. He has also recently finished work on phonological processes in Spanish for the forthcoming Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, which will soon be published by Blackwell/Wiley. Professor Morgan has recently published Sonidos en contexto: Una introducción a la fonética del español con especial referencia a la vida real with Yale University Press and has recently developed a line of research around the reconfiguration of the consonant inventories of various Spanish dialects due to variable pronunciation of the so-called 'trilled /r/'. Professor Campos-Astorkiza works on experimental phonology, focusing on the phonology-phonetics interface and the role of contrast in the shaping of sound patterns. She is currently working on an acoustic study of voicing assimilation in Spanish sibilants, which is part of her broader work on assimilation processes. She is also interested in Basque phonetics and phonology. She recently published The Role and Representation of Minimal Contrast and the Phonetics-Phonology Interaction with Lincom, studies in Theoretical Linguistics 41, 2009.
Historical Linguistics
Professor Martínez-Gil has finished an historical treatments of word minimality and sound change in Hispano-Romance. Additionally, he has recently been working on a prosodic solution to the palatal increment in the doy, soy, estoy, voy, and hay verb forms (forthcoming in the Actas del VIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española).
Psycholinguistics
In this area, Professor Grinstead and lab participants are studying the temporal interpretations of clauses in the Spanish of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Related work in child English examines the grammars of case, finiteness and subject-auxiliary inversion. Other research addresses the semantics and pragmatics of existential quantifiers in child English and Spanish, as well as the connotations associated with negative imperatives in Nicaraguan and Argentine Spanish. He recently edited volume entitled Hispanic Child Languages: Typical and Atypical Development with John Benjamins.
Syntax, Semantics
In this area, Professor Gutiérrez-Rexach's recent projects address indefinites, the foundations of syntax, degree structures, exclamatives, demonstratives, the syntax of Latin American dialects, and the grammar of film/painting. With Ignacio Bosque, he recently published Fundamentos de sintaxis formal with Akal Cambridge.
Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics
In this area, Professor Schwenter has presented and published work on the pragmatics of both Spanish and Portuguese, including recent collaborations with Rena Torres Cacoullos on tense and aspect as well as Spanish clitic placement, all from a cross-dialectal variationist perspective. Other recent collaborations with Gláucia Silva have addressed discourse anaphora and direct object realization in Portuguese. Professor Morgan continues to work on an online catalog of dialect samples from the Spanish-speaking world. Professor Grinstead has recently presented work on conventional implicatures in Argentine Spanish.
